Platonic Patterns is a reprint collection of many of Holger Thesleff's studies in Plato—spanning from 1967 to 2003. It includes three books, four articles and a new introduction by the author, which sets the general outline of his interpretation of Plato. Whereas much of the scholarship on Plato has tended to operate within the frame of one language and/or a single school of thought, Thesleff constructively combines several discoveries and theories of various scholars with his own research, focusing on (...) how Plato can be understood in his own context. The work represents small but significant breakthroughs in research on Plato from an internationally inclusive standpoint. Having previously been published mainly in Finland by scholarly societies, availability outside the Nordic countries has, up until now, been minimal. Thesleff employs his singular expertise of Greek language and literature to make innovative contributions to the study and interpretation of Plato. He thematically stresses the significance of the less overt elements found in Plato's dialogues, such as Plato's use of humor and his linguistic expression, while taking into account the chronology and/or the intended audience. (shrink)

Drawing on recent work in developmental and comparative psychology, this paper argues that demonstratives function to coordinate the interlocutors' joint focus of attention, which is one of the most basic functions of human communication. The communicative importance of demonstratives is reflected in a number of properties that together characterize them as a particular word class: In contrast to other closed-class expressions, demonstratives are universal, they are generally so old that their roots cannot be traced back to other linguistic items, they (...) are among the earliest words that children learn, and they are closely tied to a particular gesture. Moreover, demonstratives play an important role in the organization of discourse and the diachronic evolution of grammar, which arguably is also motivated by their communicative function to establish joint attention. (shrink)

The conflicting findings from the few studies conducted with regard to gender differences in the recognition of vocal expressions of emotion have left the exact nature of these differences unclear. Several investigators have argued that a comprehensive understanding of gender differences in vocal emotion recognition can only be achieved by replicating these studies while accounting for influential factors such as stimulus type, gender-balanced samples, number of encoders, decoders and emotional categories. This study aimed to account for these factors by investigating (...) whether emotion recognition from vocal expressions differs as a function of both listeners’ and speakers’ gender. A total of N = 290 participants were randomly and equally allocated to two groups. One group listened to words and pseudo-words, while the other group listened to sentences and affect bursts. Participants were asked to categorize the stimuli with respect to the expressed emotions in a fixed-choice response format. Overall, females were more accurate than males when decoding vocal emotions, however, when testing for specific emotions these differences were small in magnitude. Speakers’ gender had a significant impact on how listeners’ judged emotions from the voice. The group listening to words and pseudo-words had higher identification rates for emotions spoken by male than by female actors, whereas in the group listening to sentences and affect bursts the identification rates were higher when emotions were uttered by female than male actors. The mixed pattern for emotion-specific effects, however, indicates that, in the vocal channel, the reliability of emotion judgments is not systematically influenced by speakers’ gender and the related stereotypes of emotional expressivity. Together, these results extend previous findings by showing effects of listeners’ and speakers’ gender on the recognition of vocal emotions. They stress the importance of distinguishing these factors to explain recognition ability in the processing of emotional prosody. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the possibilities for arriving at a useful conception of methodological reductionism. Some participants in the debate talk about methodological reductionism as a research program. I argue that the concept of a research program, at least in Lakatos’ sense, cannot account for the diverse nature of methodological reductionism. I then present my own concept of a research directive as a useful alternative and elaborate on this by drawing on Hasok Chang’s theory of ontological principles and epistemic (...) activities. According to my view, the reductionist research directive can be characterized as consisting of the principles fundamental ontological homogeneity, part-whole asymmetry, and orderliness, together with the corresponding activities construction of identities, decomposition, and unification. I suggest that looking at reductionism in this way enables us to understand it as a gradual concept and thus go beyond the simplistic yes-or-no-questions that dominate many current debates on this topic. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a regularity theory of causation. The theory aims to be reductive and to align with our pre‐theoretic understanding of the causal relation. We show that our theory can account for a wide range of causal scenarios, including isomorphic scenarios, omissions, and scenarios which suggest that causation is not transitive.

This article presents research into human mental spatial reasoning with orientation knowledge. In particular, we look at reasoning problems about cardinal directions that possess multiple valid solutions , at human preferences for some of these solutions, and at representational and procedural factors that lead to such preferences. The article presents, first, a discussion of existing, related conceptual and computational approaches; second, results of empirical research into the solution preferences that human reasoners actually have; and, third, a novel computational model that (...) relies on a parsimonious and flexible spatio-analogical knowledge representation structure to robustly reproduce the behavior observed with human reasoners. (shrink)

The desideratum of semantic interoperability has been intensively discussed in medical informatics circles in recent years. Originally, experts assumed that this issue could be sufficiently addressed by insisting simply on the application of shared clinical terminologies or clinical information models. However, the use of the term ‘ontology’ has been steadily increasing more recently. We discuss criteria for distinguishing clinical ontologies from clinical terminologies and information models. Then, we briefly present the role clinical ontologies play in two multicentric research projects. Finally, (...) we discuss the interactions between these different kinds of knowledge representation artifacts and the stakeholders involved in developing interoperational real-world clinical applications. We provide ontology engineering examples from two EU-funded projects. (shrink)

We aim to devise a Ramsey test analysis of actual causation. Our method is to define a strengthened Ramsey test for causal models. Unlike the accounts of Halpern and Pearl ([2005]) and Halpern ([2015]), the resulting analysis deals satisfactorily with both over- determination and conjunctive scenarios.

Epigenetic modifications, such as DNA methylation and post‐translation modifications of histones, have been shown to play an important role in chromatin structure, promoter activity, and cellular reprogramming. Large protein complexes, such as Polycomb and trithorax, often harbor multiple activities which affect histone tail modification. Nevertheless, the mechanisms underlying the deposition of these marks, their propagation during cell replication, and the alteration on their distribution during transformation still require further study. Here we review recent data on those processes in both normal (...) and cancer cells, and we propose that the unscheduled expression of oncogenic transcription factors causes reprogramming of normal cells into cancer stem cells. (shrink)

Most recent accounts of personal autonomy acknowledge that the social environment a person lives in, and the personal relationships she entertains, have some impact on her autonomy. Two kinds of conceptualizing social conditions are traditionally distinguished in this regard: Causally relational accounts hold that certain relationships and social environments play a causal role for the development and on-going exercise of autonomy. Constitutively relational accounts, by contrast, claim that autonomy is at least partly constituted by a person’s social environment or standing. (...) The central aim of this paper is to raise the question how causally and constitutively relational approaches relate to the fact that we exercise our autonomy over time. I argue that once the temporal scope of autonomy is opened up, we need not only to think differently about the social dimension of autonomy. We also need to reconsider the very distinction between causally and constitutively relational accounts, because it is itself a synchronic (and not a diachronic) distinction. (shrink)

The paper provides a formal representation of goal systems. The focus is on three properties: consistency, conflict, and coherence. An aim is to attain conceptual clarity of these properties. It is argued that consistency is adequately regarded as a property relative to the decision situation or, more specifically, the set of alternatives that the agent faces. Moreover, as a condition of rationality, consistency is stronger than some writers have claimed. Conflict is adequately regarded as a relation over subsets of a (...) given goal system and should likewise be regarded as relative to the set of alternatives that the agent faces. Coherence is given a probabilistic interpretation, based on a support relation over subsets of goal systems. (shrink)

This article looks at some main stages of contemporary thought about freedom and responsibility and outlines an account of important stages of 20th century philosophy as well. Whereas the early Sartre particularly coined the notion of infinite freedom, his later writings, Levinas and Derrida discovered the conception of infinite responsibility. The article draws attention to the questions which arise out of these understandings of both responsibility and freedom and asks whether these issues can be answered from a purely secular point (...) of view. The last part is devoted to the role of God in current philosophical considerations about responsibility and freedom. (shrink)

Since in Modernism inner meaning is doubted or believed lost, the question arises of what an interpretation ignoring the established dialectics of outside and inside and limiting itself to an exclusive surface would look like. Henri Matisse’s decorations’ raise questions about the differences between figure and background, appearance and essence, inside and outside. Instead of reference to depth under the surface, it is density and expansion, concentration and contraction, which determine the occurrence of meaning on the surface. Matisse presents himself (...) as a flâneur of the surface, as if he wanted to show us, in the words of Gilles Deleuze, that ‘[i]t is by following the border, by skirting the surface, that one passes from bodies to the corporeal’. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyse actual causation in terms of production. The latter concept is made precise by a strengthened Ramsey Test semantics of conditionals: \ iff, after suspending judgement about A and C, C is believed in the course of assuming A. This test allows us to verify or falsify that an event brings about another event. Complementing the concept of production by a weak condition of difference-making gives rise to a full-fledged analysis of causation.

Ohne den Verleger Hermann Niemeyer hätte es keine DVjs gegeben. Am Beispiel dieser Zeitschrift untersucht der Beitrag auf der Grundlage unveröffentlichter Korrespondenzen, unter welchen historischen Bedingungen und Konstellationen eine funktionierende Infrastruktur für wissenschaftliches Publizieren im Deutschland der 1920er und 1930er Jahre geschaffen und unterhalten wurde.

This paper offers a review of research on demonstratives from an interdisciplinary perspective. In particular, we consider the role of demonstratives in current research on language universals, language evolution, language acquisition, multimodal communication, signed language, language and perception, language in interaction, spatial imagery, and discourse processing. Traditionally, demonstratives are analyzed as a particular class of spatial deictics. Yet, a number of recent studies have argued that space is largely irrelevant to deixis and that demonstratives are primarily used for social and (...) interactive purposes. Synthesizing findings in the literature, we conclude that demonstratives are a very special class of linguistic items that are foundational to both spatial and social aspects of language and cognition. (shrink)

This book aims to lay bare the logical foundations of tractable reasoning. It draws on Marvin Minsky's seminal work on frames, which has been highly influential in computer science and, to a lesser extent, in cognitive science. Only very few people have explored ideas about frames in logic, which is why the investigation in this book breaks new ground. The apparent intractability of dynamic, inferential reasoning is an unsolved problem in both cognitive science and logic-oriented artificial intelligence. By means of (...) a logical investigation of frames and frame concepts, Andreas devises a novel logic of tractable reasoning, called frame logic. Moreover, he devises a novel belief revision scheme, which is tractable for frame logic. These tractability results shed new light on our logical and cognitive means to carry out dynamic, inferential reasoning. Modularity remains central for tractability, and so the author sets forth a logical variant of the massive modularity hypothesis in cognitive science. (shrink)

In a series of 5 experiments, we investigated whether the processing of phonologically assimilated utterances is influenced by language learning. Previous experiments had shown that phonological assimilations, such as /lean#bacon/→ [leam bacon], are compensated for in perception. In this article, we investigated whether compensation for assimilation can occur without experience with an assimilation rule using automatic event-related potentials. Our first experiment indicated that Dutch listeners compensate for a Hungarian assimilation rule. Two subsequent experiments, however, failed to show compensation for assimilation (...) by both Dutch and Hungarian listeners. Two additional experiments showed that this was due to the acoustic properties of the assimilated utterance, confirming earlier reports that phonetic detail is important in compensation for assimilation. Our data indicate that compensation for assimilation can occur without experience with an assimilation rule, in line with phonetic-phonological theories that assume that speech production is influenced by speech-perception abilities. (shrink)

We put forth an analysis of causation. The analysis centers on the notion of a causal model that provides only partial information as to which events occur, but complete information about the dependences between the events. The basic idea is this: an event causes another just in case there is a causal model that is uninformative on both events and in which the first event makes a difference as to the occurrence of the other. We show that our analysis captures (...) more causal scenarios than the other counterfactual accounts to date. (shrink)

There is a growing consensus that the mental lexicon contains both abstract and word-specific acoustic information. To investigate their relative importance for word recognition, we tested to what extent perceptual learning is word specific or generalizable to other words. In an exposure phase, participants were divided into two groups; each group was semantically biased to interpret an ambiguous Mandarin tone contour as either tone1 or tone2. In a subsequent test phase, the perception of ambiguous contours was dependent on the exposure (...) phase: Participants who heard ambiguous contours as tone1 during exposure were more likely to perceive ambiguous contours as tone1 than participants who heard ambiguous contours as tone2 during exposure. This learning effect was only slightly larger for previously encountered than for not previously encountered words. The results speak for an architecture with prelexical analysis of phonological categories to achieve both lexical access and episodic storage of exemplars. (shrink)

The well-known formal semantics of conditionals due to Stalnaker Studies in logical theory, Blackwell, Oxford, 1968), Lewis, and Gärdenfors The logic and 1140 epistemology of scientific change, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1978, Knowledge in flux, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1988) all fail to distinguish between trivially and nontrivially true indicative conditionals. This problem has been addressed by Rott :345–370, 1986) in terms of a strengthened Ramsey Test. In this paper, we refine Rott’s strengthened Ramsey Test and the corresponding analysis of explanatory relations. We (...) show that our final analysis captures the presumed asymmetry between explanans and explanandum much better than Rott’s original analysis. (shrink)

The well-known formal semantics of conditionals due to Stalnaker Studies in logical theory, Blackwell, Oxford, 1968), Lewis, and Gärdenfors The logic and 1140 epistemology of scientific change, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1978, Knowledge in flux, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1988) all fail to distinguish between trivially and nontrivially true indicative conditionals. This problem has been addressed by Rott :345–370, 1986) in terms of a strengthened Ramsey Test. In this paper, we refine Rott’s strengthened Ramsey Test and the corresponding analysis of explanatory relations. We (...) show that our final analysis captures the presumed asymmetry between explanans and explanandum much better than Rott’s original analysis. (shrink)